Why Amazon Sellers Are Moving their Stores to Alternative eCommerce Platforms During COVID-19
As a consumer, if you have tried to order anything off of Amazon in the last few weeks, you’ve likely noticed one or more of the following scenarios:
- The item is not available
- The item’s price has drastically increased
- The shipping times can extend as long as a month
As a business owner, you may have encountered difficulties fulfilling orders or been unable to sell certain products because of new restrictions that have been put in place by Amazon. Due to the high demand for online shopping during the Coronavirus pandemic essential items are given priority over non-essential items.
Essential items are being classified by Amazon as:
- Baby items
- Health & Household Items
- Beauty and Personal Care Items
- Grocery products
- Industrial & Scientific Items
- Pet Supplies
If an Amazon seller’s products fall outside of one of these categories they will not be able to send a shipment to a fulfillment center to replenish their inventory once it runs out. As a result, while in the past many sellers relied on Amazon to sell their products, many are being forced to leave simply because they need to be able to continue to sell their products.
Where Are Sellers Moving Their Products To?
Once the decision has been made to move their products off of Amazon, the question remains for sellers — where should they offer their products now? For many the answer is creating an online store of their own, so they no longer need to rely on Amazon and be subjected to their rules, restrictions, and guidelines for selling.
If this is the position you have found yourself in, here are some great options:
Shopify
Shopify is likely the eCommerce platform sellers are most familiar with. Shopify is ideal for many sellers because it’s easy to use, offers a lot of features, and can often be integrated with other apps you already use for tracking orders or customer service (such as Re:amaze service offerings).
Shopify is great for those with less technical experience, as it offers both the necessary software and hosting needed to launch your eCommerce website. The admin panel is extremely intuitive and user-friendly making it possible for someone who is new to managing an eCommerce site to use.
Another benefit of using Shopify is that they offer a variety of quality, professional website templates to create a visually pleasing digital storefront — or if you want it to match your existing website, you can have a designer create a custom template.
Shopify websites are mobile responsive, have great page load speeds, and allow you to optimize your store for SEO. Your site will also be able to integrate your marketing efforts by enabling you to offer custom gift cards, discount codes, email marketing, and provide you with advanced analytics for your store. Products can be sold on your online store or on social platforms.
For payments, store owners can integrate an existing payment gateway, or the platform itself accepts payments via Stripe. They also offer high-quality customer support for store owners.
BigCommerce
BigCommerce is another very user-friendly interface for eCommerce business owners. Their high-quality customer support is one of the biggest benefits of using BigCommerce. Store owners can sell their products on their custom BigCommerce website or on other social media channels like Facebook.
This eCommerce shop platform is very user-friendly and easy to set up, even for those who aren’t as technically advanced and may be worried about setting up a new eCommerce store. The platform offers tools to optimize your store for SEO, which is a very important feature.
Plus, in addition to being able to support payment gateways like PayPal or Google Checkout, BigCommerce accepts all major payment gateways. The platform also supports all major shipping providers and can be integrated with existing apps you are already using like Re:amaze.
WooCommerce
One of the greatest advantages of WooCommerce is it is a free platform, which may appeal to many store owners, especially those who are looking to keep expenses down. Another benefit of using WooCommerce is that it is actually a WordPress plugin that will integrate into your existing website. This means if you already have a WordPress site, you can easily add this plugin and begin building your eCommerce offering.
Since this plugin integrates into your existing website you’ll have immediate access to analytics, which can also be integrated into Google Analytics seamlessly which is important. WooCommerce provides users with a lot of customization options with dozens of themes to choose from to differentiate your store from other WooCommerce stores.
This platform allows you to integrate many payment options so you can be more flexible with the types of payments you accept. The plugin allows you to market your store efficiently too with the ability to optimize for SEO options and target long-tail keywords within your content.
Wix
Wix is a popular eCommerce platform for a number of reasons. One being that is offered for free to users and is a very user-friendly platform. Users can create professional-looking sites, even if they have little to no technical skills required.
Websites are created using a “drag and drop” method which allows users to simply choose what elements they want to add to their site and drag them to the spot on the page they want to place them.
Wix offers users a wide range of templates to choose from and a variety of special features, including the ability to allow visitors to subscribe to your site and receive email newsletters created using Wix Email Marketing tool.
Squarespace
Business owners like Squarespace because it is an all-in-one platform that allows users to build your eCommerce store in one central location, choosing from their many themes (they have over 100 to choose from) and store elements.
Squarespace offers great analytics, page load times, and excellent customer service in case you get stuck on any aspect of using their platform. A unique feature of Squarespace is that they also offer a mobile app that allows to you edit almost all aspects of your store right from your phone.
Magento
Magento is another eCommerce platform that offers users lots of features, benefits, and integrations into other shipping, inventory management, and customer services apps, like Re:amaze. These features will allow you to scale up your store and grow as demand for your product increases.
Magento websites are SEO friendly, allow stores to create SEO-friendly URLs, offer fast page load times, and provide excellent analytics with nearly two dozen different report options. This platform provides users with a high-level of customization to ensure the store looks and feels that way store owners want it to. Users can utilize one of their existing store templates or code their store from scratch for even more customization. Magento also allows for flexible content management which allows store owners to easily customize their product offerings even if they have limited technical know-how.
Should eCommerce Retailers Make the Switch?
If you are an eCommerce business currently selling on Amazon, that has been affected by stricter regulations and difficulty with meeting customer demands for shipping times and product availability leaving Amazon may be ideal.
Many eCommerce retailers opt to build their own online store to sell their products and supplemental offering inventory on Amazon. This frees you up to be in control of your product, inventory levels, and shipping times, even if Amazon decides to extend the current restrictions or add new restrictions on sellers.
While selling on Amazon has many benefits to eCommerce businesses, the COVID-19 pandemic is a great example of how depending solely on Amazon fulfillment for your products can quickly become problematic.
Even though retail spending is on a decline overall, there are certain industries that have been seeing an increase in sales right now. Such industries that offer food and grocery items, supplements and vitamins, fitness equipment, pet supplies, tech, and office products, cleaning supplies, toys, loungewear, and baking supplies are just some of the items that are in higher demand right now.
If your store sells education toys, for example, you would be considered outside of the products Amazon has deemed essential, which means you could be losing out on a lot of business.
Reduce or Pause Your Ad Spend on Amazon
Since there is no accurate timeline available for when the COVID-19 crisis will last in the United States, you may want to consider pausing or reducing your ad budget on Amazon. If you are unable to sell on Amazon, it is advisable to pause your ads completely, however, if you are still able to sell your products, reducing your ad spend is more ideal than stopping it completely.
Adjust Your Business Operations
There are a few things to consider here, first switching to a different eCommerce platform as we mentioned above. Another thing to consider is who you are utilizing for your fulfillment center, especially if your inventory in the Amazon fulfillment center is running low or has run out. If you’re able to fulfill and ship products yourself, that will alleviate this issue, however, you may need to seek out alternative options if you’re unable to.
Another thing to consider is your supply chain and how you secure your products. If you typically rely on Chinese or other overseas providers you may be having difficulty maintaining your inventory. This is a good time to consider alternative options you have available to you before you find yourself in a position where you are no longer able to get new inventory.
If there are problems with your current logistics company with shipping times or an inability to fulfill orders you may also need to consider switching carriers or having alternative shipping methods.
Another consideration eCommerce businesses should look at is their pricing structure. It may be necessary to raise your prices slightly during this time, or conversely, if you need to move products and have high inventory levels it may actually make sense to lower your prices on certain products.
Reach Out to Your Manufacturers & Shipping Carriers
As you are adapting your business during this time, it’s important that you know what you’re dealing with. Maintaining open lines of communication with your manufacturers regarding where they stand on production and how they anticipate COVID-19 may impact your ability to maintain your inventory is key. You also need to understand how shipping costs and shipping times will be affected so you can plan accordingly.
Without this vital information, you can’t make a plan for alternative options or present your customers with an accurate update on your own store offering.
Use this as a Time to Build Your Brand
Even if you decide to reduce your paid marketing efforts, you should place some focus on building your brand in other areas. This includes ramping up your social media presence, posting blogs more regularly, updating your website and optimizing it for SEO, and utilizing email campaigns. All of these efforts contribute to your marketing goals without requiring you to invest money into ad campaigns. (If you’re able to continue running ads, even at a low daily budget, this is advisable.)
Take this time to focus on your brand message and the content you are creating. Streamline your messaging and work on creating really great content so you remain top of mind for existing and potential customers.
It’s also important to continually communicate with your customers, providing them with updates on shipping times or delays, inventory levels, and new product availability. Be sure to update product pages often and accurately reflect shipping times so you don’t end up with unhappy customers who are requesting refunds.
Get a Better Idea of Your Customer’s Needs
For businesses who are looking to diversify their product offering a great approach to do this is to simply reach out to your customers directly. You can send an email survey to your existing list, create a poll on your website, and even ask customers to comment and message on social media. This can help you determine whether you should consider shifting your focus to offer products your customers really want and need, which ultimately can help you maintain and even increase sales during this time.
Another thing to keep in mind is that you should be shifting your focus and product offerings to an at-home audience.
Unless you sell products that are specifically targeted to essential workers (like doctors or nurses), most of your customers are currently under shelter-in-place orders. Bearing this in mind, you may be able to fine-tune your target offering more accurately even if you don’t receive a lot of feedback from customers.
The Impact of Coronavirus on eCommerce Retailers
The impact the Coronavirus pandemic has on eCommerce retailers will continue to shift the longer shelter-in-place orders last. Already, many business owners have had to quickly adapt to an online-only business model, laying off employees, difficulty maintaining inventory levels — and as we discussed in the blog — moving their product offering off of Amazon and building a new eCommerce store for their brand.
All of these changes require swift action and adaptability on the part of the business owner. Another factor to consider is that even these trends may shift quickly in the days to come. Already business owners are diversifying their product offerings and many new businesses have even popped up selling Coronavirus related products.
Maintaining the ability to change direction quickly, will help you leverage your product offering and boost sales, even after the pandemic is behind us.
About Re:amaze
Re:amaze is a modern helpdesk and customer messaging platform designed to help eCommerce businesses boost customer happiness and revenue. Re:amaze allows all customer-oriented teams to work together in a shared inbox through email, social, SMS, voice, and live chat. Re:amaze also comes packaged with automated messaging and chatbots so eCommerce brands can succeed at the front lines of conversational commerce.
from Hacker News https://ift.tt/3bdt2ov
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